Alleged Europcar breach involved fake data possibly from ChatGPT

Major car rental company Europcar has denied the claimed theft of data belonging to over 48 million of its customers being promoted in a hacking forum, noting that the information was fake and potentially generated by OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot, reports TechCrunch. While the stolen cache of data was purported to include customers' full names, birthdates, home addresses, and ZIP codes, as well as their usernames and passwords, Europcar noted inconsistencies in the number of allegedly exfiltrated records, as well as the inclusion of nonexistent home addresses and non-matching names and email addresses suspected to be created with ChatGPT. Moreover, all of the email addresses in the sample of stolen data were also noted to not be in Europcar's customer database. The legitimacy of the hacked data was also dismissed by Have I Been Pwned? administrator Troy Hunt, who expressed skepticism over the presence of ChatGPT-generated data in the dataset. "We've had fabricated breaches since forever because people want airtime or to make a name for themselves or maybe a quick buck. Who knows, it doesn't matter, because none of that makes it 'AI,'" wrote Hunt in X, formerly Twitter.